Many theatergoers visit Broadway to see musicals, but they’re missing a good bet if they don’t also catch a good play. Other Desert Cities, in an open run at New York’s Booth Theatre, is one of the most acclaimed new plays of the past season – as well as a leading contender for the Tony awards, with five nominations – including best play, actress and featured actress. Deservedly so, based on a performance I saw during my recent New York theater trip for The Dispatch. And not just because of the absorbing and entertaining performances by Stockard Channing, Stacy Keach (who was unfairly overlooked for a Tony nomination), Judith Light and two others.

(Elizabeth Marvel and Stacy Keach in the Broadway production of Other Desert Cities. Credit: Joan Marcus)

Beyond its witty and revealing dialogue and gripping performances, Other Desert Cities registers as a must-see on Broadway because of its penetrating and ultimately compassionate portrait of a contemporary family divided by ideology and more personal tensions and secrets. Playwright Jon Robin Baitz (The Substance of Fire, Ten Unknowns, The Paris Letter), best known in recent years for his writing for television (Brothers & Sisters), has returned to the New York theater world for a belated Broadway debut with perhaps his best play yet. Baitz finds ample humor, pathos, irony, strife and tragedy in his two-act drama about what binds – and separates – parents and their adult children. Channing and Keach play polished and manicured Polly and Lyman Wyeth, affluent conservative Reaganite Republicans who are visited at their Palm Springs home over the holidays by their adult daughter and son, both highly liberal offspring who know how to punch their parents’ buttons. But as we soon see, they learned that skill from their parents, show-biz folk who still have what it takes to command center stage. Channing, who impressed me with her charisma and depth on Broadway in Six Degrees of Separation and a revival of The Little Foxes, is similarly triumphant in a somewhat more subtle role that allows her to display her razor-sharped wit on the surface while revealing both strength and wounds underneath. Keach movingly captures the doddering and fading strength of a former actor-politician whose best moves and words have long ago become rote. Keach is especially poignant when he pleads with family members to respect the family’s privacy and leave him and his wife in peace in their remaining years.

Stockard Channing and Stacy Keach in the Broadway production of Other Desert Cities. Credit: Joan Marcus)

Elizabeth Marvel fuses wounded intelligence and passive-aggressive anger as Brooke Wyeth, who returns home with an ulterior motive. The talented writer – wounded from her childhood loss of her troubled brother, who committed suicide after his bad associations drew him into a Vietnam War-era bombing of a military station – has spent years secretly writing a tell-all book about the family scandal and now wants her alarmed parents’ blessings for herself and her about-to-be-published book. But that is something that Polly and Lyman are unable to give. All they ask, they plead at first, is for her to wait until they’re gone before airing the family’s dirty laundry. Once they start reading the manuscript, though, Brooke’s parents are shocked by how one-sided – and outright false, they protest – her version of what happened really is. In one of the best supporting performances I’ve seen on Broadway, Judith Light plays the alcoholic aunt Silda Grauman, dependent on support from Polly and Lyman, who secretly has supported Brooke in telling the story. Light (an eloquent actress, far more gaunt and older than in her TV stardom years in Who’s the Boss) delivers barbs of angry humor that brighten the play but eventually darken it into a more disturbing portrait of dysfunctionality and dependency. Matthew Risch is amusing but peripheral as Trip Wyeth, Brooke’s brother who has become successful as a TV producer. Trip, an instinctive moderator whose adult focus is on happiness and comfort after an afflicted childhood, is reluctant to take sides in the family battle. But this battle eventually forces everyone to take, or change, sides. Director Joe Mantello keeps the quips flying but the emotions centered on deeper and increasingly darker hints of what’s underneath the sunny-to-glaring lighting of Kenneth Posner that virtually radiates heat off the attractive all-white Architectural Digest setting of the modern-posh living room designed by John Lee Beatty. It wouldn’t be fair to give away the substantial plot twist that electrifies and deepens the second act. But let’s just say that Baitz plays fair with all sides of this troubled family. It’s predictable and not really that funny anymore for a liberal-left playwright to pander to Broadway’s predominant liberal-left audience by milking cheap laughs from anti-conservative quips, which litter the first act – including one from Silda skewering Polly’s belief in the right to keep and bear arms. That may automatically alienate roughly half of the potential audience of theatergoers nationwide, but that approach seems to be par for the course in theater and especially in New York. Yet, after indulging his target audience, Baitz also challenges it. His purpose in Other Desert Cities, largely achieved, is to offer a more balanced and compassionate understanding that whatever ideological differences divide families, their bonds of love, loss and regret ultimately are stronger.

IF YOU GO Other Desert Cities continues in an open run at New York’s Booth Theatre, 222 W. 45th St. For tickets, visit Telecharge outlets (212-239-6200, www.telecharge.com) For more information, visit Lincoln Center Theatre (www.lct.org)

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